We investigate partial response signaling (PRS) as a way of increasing the transmission length achievable by direct detection optical systems. The performance of the duobinary and PRS modulations is evaluated against that of conventional on-off-keying (OOK). We prove by simulation and experimentally that duobinary increases the link distance by up to 1.5 times and PRS by up to 3 times, when no signal processing is employed. The gain is preserved even when equalization is used. PRS is employed also with 4-level pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM-4) and is shown to improve the transmission distance by almost 3 times.